I first became interested in robots in 1974. I was taking a computer science courses, and I saw the cover of a magazine called Psychology Today. It had a picture of a robotic arm and talked about artificial intelligence. I became intensly interested in neural networks in the late eighties. I have experimented with some extremely rudimentary designs that have applied very simple mechanical principles. I am currently trying to come up with a simple design for a mechanical arm and hand. My purpose is to design and build something that can be easily and cheaply reproduced. My ultimate goal is to have this arm and hand be able to participate in the construction and maintaince of copies of itself. In this way I hope to get multiple robots interacting with each other. I realize that this is an rather unbelieveably ambitious project. I am trying to keep it reduced to its rawest essentials. Writing about it now does fill me with some degree of hopelessness. I think that it quite good for me however to be finally publically stating this as a goal.

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Basically, what I'm working on is the non-business
business model. To me the greatest contemporary invention
was the dune buggy. It took a junk VW and gave it real
value. I hope to do the same with what I still don't know

What would be the one thing I would want to say about
robotics? I guess there's a series of things. That's where
I get into trouble. I can't narrow it down. I suppose I
should start with artificial intelligence. An artificially
intelligent machine has to be evolved. It can't be
designed in one fell swoop. What is needed is a platform
that can be steadily improved upon. It has to be the
ultimate in simplicity. Probably the most important
feature would be feedback. Feedback is the cornerstone of
intelligence if intelligence is the ability to adapt. Of
the five human senses that make feedback possibe the sense
of touch is the most basic. You can be blind, deaf and
dumb, but if you can't feel you're a vegetable. If you
have motion and feedback from that motion then you're a
player. You can interact with the world. You can start
building the foundations of intelligence. Next you need an
application. You have to have a purpose. Information is
just applied data. Intelligence is applied information.
Wisdom is applied intelligence etc. The most basic
application would be reproduction. The machine has to be
simple enough that it can participate in it's own
reproduction yet complex enough that it can do useable
work. Also it has to be cost effective enough that it can
flourish. Once it can participate and in some sense
control its reproduction then it can branch out to other
uses and become more viable. It will eventually need
mobility but in its nuturing stage it can start as
stationary as long as it can reach out. To me, what it has
to be able to do is grasp. In today's robotics end
effectors are all designed for specific uses. The hand is
considered superflous. I believe it is the cornerstone to
intelligence. Robonaut uses a hand, but it is strictly
remote control, and the space program has slowed to a
crawl. We'll be waiting a long time for it to evolve.
Asimov too has hands, but does not accentuate feedback.
The beauty of Asimov is its motors. For an intelligent
machine to evolve and flourish it has to as motor
independent as possible. An intelligent machine will
eventually be able to make something as complex as a
motor, but that complexity has to be put off as long as
possible.

The basic physical axiom of robotics is the strength to
wieght ratio. If it not greater than one the robot cannot
even move itself. If it is to do useable work it has to be
much greater. The trick as I see it is to have the power
source removed from the remote manipulator. This would
indicate some sort of tendon control.

There is much more to be written down, but this should
constitute a beginning.

What am I up to this morning? Building a website? Where do
I start? I guess I'm pretty lost. Can you tell? By coming
here I thought I might help remedy that. I'm the king of
wishful thinking. I need to come up with ideas to write
down on my website. I started out with idea of discovering
the secret of artificial intelligence. First there is the
axiom of "garbage in, garbage out". Only an embodied
intelligence solve it. An embodied intelligence has a
closed loop between information gathering and information
usage. You can't evolve artificial intelligence without it
imho. The most basic sense to gather this information for
use in performing useable work would be the sense of
touch, You can be blind, deaf and dumb, but if you're numb
you're a vegetable. What's the simplest way of
implementing a sense of touch, the so called haptic
interface? I decided for me it would be to use opposing
forces. I'm still working out an explanation of what I'm
trying to do. It's easier for me to show what I'm doing
than explain it. I need a picture.

Posted as a reply to the question as to whether machines
will ever be conscious:
Moravec wrote a book, Machine Evolution, the jest of which,
I believe, is that machines are following the path humans
followed only they are moving a lot faster. Another thing
to keep in mind is that humans started off thinking that
everything had a spirit including rocks. It's called
animism. Life is a stimulus response organism. A machine
that responds to stimuli, that follows cybernetic
principles might be said to be artificially alive. Beyond
that it is a matter of complexity. At what level do natural
organisms attain consciousness? If an organism has a nerve
cell does that mean it has the ability to be conscious of
something? Isn't this the same as the old argument about
intelligence? Look at viruses. Will viruses ever evolve
into something more complex? Will the net itself ever
develope a sense of idenity? It is the thing that most
closely resembles the human brain. I think that that is the
thing that disappoints me the most about robots.net. So
much of it is devoted to the brain of the robot. The
internet should be brain of the robot! Or at least it will
be someday. As with everything else I am in too much of a
hurry. The first brains were just dead ends on the spinal
cord. They were just muscle controllers. That's where we
are today. Look at Aibo, Asimov and the robot olympics. The
most glaring deficit in all these logic designs is the lack
of feedback. Of course what should one expect when the goal
is basic survival? Think of what life was like for early
human beings when life expectancy was about twenty years.
Inhibitions and IQ weren't real high on the list.

Been away for quite a while. First I acquired computer
vision syndrome. It got so it really hurt to spend time in
front of a computer monitor. I took a lot of time off
therefore to heal. I feel pretty good now. Then when when I
did feel good enough to get back online my hard disk shot
craps. I found a old junk computer and swapped out the hard
disk from it, so I'm back in business. Let's see what kind
of run I can put together this time.